YouSaid · the spoken record

Mitchell Baker

lines on the record: 87
first: 2023-02-14
most recent: 2023-02-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“As you said, people opt for convenience very often, but increasingly, you know, you do have to take care of yourself. And so you'll see and hear more from us about that. We have launched on a broader Mozilla piece, you know, Mozilla Ventures, which is a small fund for investing in other organizations that we think can help build better internet. Mozilla AI organization will come back. We'll say more about that as we go forward. So I think really to keep looking for Mozilla modernizing multiple efforts, more focus on the user and consumer and arrange a new product and offerings coming.”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're starting our second quarter century this year. And so our priority list has got on the full Mozilla piece, multi-product, multi-effort, ways of impacting the internet. And so on the product org that I have, as you pointed out, there's a lot happening in browsers still, or right now today. So keep looking for things from us on that piece across the range of things that we've talked about. There are multiple products. We have a product called Pocket, which we're in the midst right now of an expansion of capabilities about that, which I'm not going to announce those things now, but you'll hear about those. So I keep looking for those things that are interested. As I said, our Mastodon experiment and exploration will go live pretty soon. So you'll see those things. You'll see more focus on helping people.”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not advocating that Mozilla aim for small shares, but that it is possible to have a pretty big influence at a smaller number than people suspect. And again, for us, that's a really successful case.”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so even at those market shares, you can have change. You can show the possibility of something different. And Firefox had impact most is open source now, except for Apple stuff. You know, lots of changes came out of that 30% market share, including a bunch of things about how the web was built. And so like a smaller alternative that is better and different is fine, like showing the promise of what could be is intensely valuable for us. You know, we don't have to take it to the dominant control everything piece. I think we should learn as Mozilla that you don't want to give up too much because things can change and you can find some of the world that you've built gets twisted in ways and you'd like to have more impact on it.”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I do think it is time and likely that our social media experiences are evolving and should evolve. I don't know. I can't say has Twitter run its course, well, has the thing that Twitter was built to be? Are people done with it? Yeah. Is microblogging the way it is? Like, is that over? It didn't seem like that for its core audience wasn't growing. So there's something about the Twitter experience that's really gripping for a set of people, but it's a smaller set of people than the other things that we've seen. But certainly, again, at Mozilla, because of the way we're set up, being a smaller alternative is a fine thing with us. You know, Firefox had a tight was maybe 28% market share, maybe 30, but certainly never like dominant, ever.”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a question of those things may have also run their course in a decentralized version of those things might improve on all the metrics that you just mentioned, but also just sort of harness a consumer demand for something new.”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Flavor that isn't so great for Negative actors and racists and misogynists and state actors and conspiracy theory and mental illness we would love to see that, but it's not a question of, oh, go take on Facebook or go be the next Twitter.”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really broad exclusion, which we would never make. But here, I think it's the combination of there is a decentralized protocol. It does allow a kind of experimentation and it allows for the development of something new. I don't think, I certainly don't have a desire to make another Twitter or clone Twitter or try to do Twitter or Facebook better. The question is, how is it that people can engage with each other in a way that's fun and healthy and doesn't have all the drawbacks that we have? And so Mastodon is interesting because you do have a lot of that experimentation. And the questions of content moderation and what's it like to be in this community, those decisions are much closer to the communities themselves and it's not one centralized decision maker. So that's an interesting piece on many different fronts. And sure, we would all”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What you're saying. But as a business practice and a question of where can we have impact, it's hard to, one of the things that, you know, I guess Facebook really taught us is that social is really valuable in a lot of settings. But is Facebook the be-all or end-all forever? Probably not. I mean, there's Instagram. So I guess the answer is no. But so I think not doing something because it could be social media is.”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In our earlier call, your team referred, you have a new C suite in Missoula Corporation, and your team referred to them as big tech refugees. It said, oh, the whole C suite worked at big tech companies like Twitter and Facebook. One of the frameworks you kind of used earlier in the conversation was, okay, there's Google, which is the open web, and we align on some places and we compete on some places, but this core piece of the information should be accessible. We believe in that. And then there's Facebook, which is a closed ecosystem. You publish an Instagram reel. No one can find it unless you use their products. As you talk about Mastodon, right, and decentralization in that instance, you are now competing against Facebook. Like Mastodon is a social network. It is different in a meaningful way and that it's composed of all these distributed servers. But it's a social network. It's a competitor. It's where people are going to, instead of Twitter today. Is there a piece of, okay, you've got this whole team that came from?”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From the crypto people, sure. Yeah, fair enough. So we'll see. I think that's going to be a few years down the road to really have an evaluation of the underlying technology separate from the use case. I mean, when your use case is money. I get everything's going to be overblown and hyped and it's money, right? Like money brings out the best and the worst and the worst often, you know, in people. So to understand whether that is a form of decentralization and whether there might be interoperability among chains, I still think that's a long-term question about what I call decentralized technologies, but I don't think we're going to see a lot of that in the next couple of years.”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think about what would a broader set of users be. And it's a little, you know, it's a bit of an art to be able to span the two of those. And so that's a piece really I want to emphasize. It's a learning piece for us because it's easy when you build one big successful product to think more of yourself than you should. and roll into an existing kind of vibrant community and do stupid things so we're in the learning but to answer your question what other protocols are out there you know that's certainly one I think it will take some time for us to understand what is the impact of blockchain separate from crypto.”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're going to build, you know, tell you how it is. That's not what we want to do. So there's a question about the open source project and protocol and its development. I think for where Mozilla has a fair amount of history, as you point out, in open source, so that might be an area, but that depends a lot, of course, on the project. And then there's also a user experience for people that's easier or comes from a name that people know and trust, like the current Mastodon instances are community-based. So it's possible, like Mozilla could be the place where a kind of broader group makes sense. If that's to occur, there's a client, but there's also, of course, you run an instance, you're running a server, so you're running a service, and those things can vary a lot. So there's some exploration. And what's a service that would make sense? You're trying to, you know, you've got a current community and then you're trying to...”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And do you think it's about standing up in instance? So I don't know Mozilla.social or whatever. It will be and people can sign into it and it is a social network that Mozilla controls. It is part of the Fediverse. Or is it about we're going to build tools to let anybody stand up a server? There are some, I think, Squarespace and out something like that today. Or is it we're going to build a client for this larger protocol that is very difficult to use the way that Firefox is a client for a set of web protocols that a normal person could not themselves use?”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The consumer space if there's anything at all, it's Mastodon. The protocol itself, I think that's a really interesting question, which is The nature of the community around Mastodon. And when we think about it, how much is the protocol itself and how much is actually the community of people engaging with it and building things and trying to do something new? The protocol itself is like a distributed protocol. And take time and energy and stuff to build. They're complicated, but the real success also needs a set of people who are interested enough to do something different. And that, I think, is the larger Mastodon question. So who knows where it will go? You know, Mozilla is, as we've said, going to shortly stand up our own instance of it so that we can learn more, understand more, contribute to the community, and really begin to explore hands-on, how far might this protocol go.”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The web we've been talking about almost all time has been like radically commercialized and closed down and those protocols aren't really up for grabs the way that you know when I got my first iMac there was”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The performance characteristics are. I appreciate it. I'm sure your team will appreciate the fighting spirit there. There's some news about Thunderbird today. It's the email client from Mozilla. There's a long video about why Thunderbird is the way it is and a new version is coming out. It occurs to me as I was watching this video. Firefox is the instantiation of a very important protocol, right? It's HTTP and the web and all this stuff. Thunderbird is about email and the internet protocols that run email, which are open source anybody can plug into. And this is where the successes have been, right? How do you build values-based products around these open protocols that anybody can interact with and that comprise the internet at large?”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Order of magnitude or next generation technology in the browser space. I haven't seen that on the horizon with the browsers the way they're configured. Could you make something smaller? Like if it turns out what we really want to do is talk to our browsers and not read so much. Maybe you get something much smaller. Like really, a lot of the complexity of the browsers rendering all this stuff. If you're not doing that, you probably can be a lot smaller and lighter. And so you might be able to get that kind of massive change. But anyway, right now I do want to come back and say Firefox has a product as a good product. The performance characteristics are worst looking into and I can't let you see even about the past live that unaddressed.”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Instrumentation and collection of whatever data was useful or could be had for my own purposes is a problem too. And so you see that. So Chrome had the advantage when it came out, new generation built by Mozilla people who understood the flaws of the old one for sure. So next generation technology. It was faster and better at the time. And their view on data, I mean, data collection practices were pretty radical for us at the time. We spent a decade trying to figure out and building like telemetry for our products that allows us to build what we need that we're comfortable with and think if our users' privacy-conscious users dove in, they'd be comfortable too. But we have Firefox is performant and has a bunch of benefits that Chrome doesn't now. So I do think it's possible. I think we've done it to get that whole”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And we were each right. Like Google was right that you need to instrument your product and you need data to build something today that responds to people and people want. And we suffered because we didn't do that for a long time. But we were right that the wholesale”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Okay, a couple things. The fast and bloated piece I'll own up to when Chrome came out. There's a few other things actually about product stuff. Data was one of them. So it's an interesting case study where when Chrome came out, the instrumentation of the browser, in the first versions of Chrome frankly appalled us at Mozilla. Really?”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Long time ago, Firefox was the small fast browser, right? It was look at all this bloat of IE, fine. It was the default Firefox is nimble and fast and open source and you feel great using it. And it took a lot of share at that point in time. And then Chrome did the same thing to Firefox and pretty much a direct lift Firefox has gotten old and bloated. And so your IT administrator wants you to use. You just install Chrome. It's fast and nimble in Google made it. Is there another turn where you can do that to Chrome, which I think a lot of people would complain is bloated and full of Google's revenue ideas instead of user experience ideas.”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, yes, you do need some real change. And this might be it. So, you know, I think Microsoft has invested a lot and we'll certainly first out the gate, so we'll see what it is. But to your core question, yes, I think, as I said, the muscle memory of browser use is just deeply, deeply, deeply ingrained. And so why would I change from something that I've been using for a long time need something? And as you're right, like the last five, eight, ten years, there's not a lot.”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not my wish in the world, but I think history shows us that you need something really significant now for people to think about changing their browsers. It's deeply locked in, especially if you're using Google or Microsoft systems. So yes, you do need something.”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Has trumped convenience for people, and even that hasn't really trumped convenience. And now there's one feature in the past decade, which is it's got this chat bot built into it that is making people think, oh, I should do something that's less convenient. Do you need a feature like that to compete in browsers? Or is it we're flipping the table and the Google built revenue framework of the web in it's just open season?”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is there another feature for the web? That you could gate against set us as your default. Download Firefox and set it as the default, and you can get this other thing. Because one of the tropes we have on Decoder is people pick convenience over quality all the time. It's like an iron. It comes up most often when we talk to music executives or they're like, now there's 95 channels of audio. And I'm like, yeah, but are the file sizes small? Like people are going to pick convenience or quality over and over again. And here what you have is there's been nothing except for the browser is faster and it respects your privacy.”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To bring it back around to generative AI, right? Microsoft thinks it can get share back from Google search and get share back from Chrome because it has a cool new feature. That's it, right? Like they're like, we're ahead and you can talk to a robot and the robot will write you a poem. And people want to use that so badly we can be like, install Edge on your computer and use it. I mean, they're at the point today. We were laughing about it in the Virgin Newsroom today. It's a wait list. And if you set your default browser to Edge, you move up the waitlist”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But you can't actually on a phone really set things to be default. And so there are a lot of ways where the phone operating systems also fight against people choosing what they want, which I know about in the browser space. So I think that's helpful, but you have to have some competitive piece that makes sense. That's what the EU remedies to date really show us”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do whatever it wants to Google by forcing Mozilla to fight against our customers So we see that very close to home as well. I think for consumers, the question about browsers on their phone is not about browser engines. Like that's a systematic level question of what's the Architecture of the world that you want, but for consumers it's much more what's the experience? Is the experience good? Do I want it like it's our job to make a product that's got stuff that people want in it? But stopping the operating systems from hindering that would be very helpful. I mean, just”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. Well, that's yes, exactly. And the DOJ has this lawsuit about, you know, browsers can't. Someone like us couldn't have Google as a default, right? Which is kind of like, I don't understand why the US DOJ thinks it's gonna”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're back. You mentioned there's been all these remedies in Europe and haven't really done anything, and I hear jokes from people that are like, the Europeans have been trying to get people to not use Chrome or Google search for like over a decade and the market share is rock solid. And they've, I mean, these are big interventional remedies, right? This is you boot up your Windows PC and it asks you, it puts up a browser ballot and people still pick Google. You boot up your Android phone in Europe and it's like, do you want to use Google search and people pick Google over Bing? And these are the government has installed these choice screens. And they don't seem to do anything I mean, that's the numbers are the numbers, right?”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, really on the information as it evolves. A lot will depend on what the implementation pieces look like, like browser engines are, you know, we've done a lot of work on that. So the actual incremental cost of that might be less than you might think for those things. And it will depend as we go on. Like we're pretty committed to browsers because they're really powerful, but it will also depend as our other things come into line with what needs resources at the time.”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is that you've mentioned several times you're not the size of Google? You're not even the size of Chrome team. When you think about resource allocation, is it, boy, we better be ready for this moment when the regulators open the doors and we can ship Firefox on Apple and compete head to head with Safari? Or is it I've diversified the revenue 15%? We got to get to 30 in case generative AI flips the table on WebMonetization and Google doesn't pay us. Like, how do you make that decision?”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're always looking at it. We're always kind of working on it. Like we're always looking at well, what could we do if we had, you know, the ability to offer the product we want? So we're always looking at it.”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was that antitrust case that you mentioned where these use of the operating system was illegal and determined to be illegal in both the United States and Europe. But then when Apple came out with its phones, it had no market share. And so it created ultimately this very closed system when it had very low market share and our antitrust rules aren't really set up for that. And so as it became so dominant It kind of went back to an old closed model, and Android is close to it, although Google has made efforts in some areas to be more open. But we're absolutely engaged in that. The question is, there is a deep level of implementation stuff that's really important. You know, we've seen a set of... EU remedies that aren't always effective.”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People are at least more willing to doubt. I mean, you're used to downloading apps on your phone. That's what you do. So we'll see. But to your larger question, the closed nature of mobile phones is absolutely worth looking at it and engaged in it. And it's What engine you can use at the technological level, where of course we can't build our full product on iOS, but it's also system level defaults, and even after you set something else as your default browser, what does a link open in? I mean, there are a lot of ways that the operating system can thwart choice. But I'll say again, Microsoft on the desktop is a perfect example. We shouldn't let them out. The law that allows it was really built by Apple”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is right under European regulators. There's a lot of action around something called the digital markets act in Europe that would make Apple open up to other browser engines, make Google open up to other browser engines. Is that something you're looking at to say, okay, this is our opportunity to go take Share and Mobile again because we're not just going to be a wrapper around Apple's web kit?”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fair enough, but you brought up Android earlier as well. And next to Android, I was obviously iOS. These are both much more closed systems on balance, right? iOS is much more closed than Android, but Android is still closed in its own way. The browsers are deeply integrated into Know to play with the new being. I just downloaded Edge on my Mac and ran it and set it as the default and Apple was fine with that and it runs blink, which is like Google's. It's like technologically it's very open, right? It's like Microsoft's wrapper and Google's technology running on Apple's operating system and that's all fine. And if you want to do that same sort of thing on an iPhone, you cannot just like almost every level, you are not allowed to do that thing.”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, at some level the answer is yes, because that's the new technology. The question is how much and what does it need to do? And like there's an open AI level of investment, right? But there's, which Mozilla won't make, does for sure, right? From Microsoft there. But what is it that provides the use cases that people want? So I think AI in general, for sure, and then generative AI is a particularly non-step function, you know, a particularly steep kind of change. So, yeah, I think we'll see some changes. I think unanswered is how quickly people change their use cases in the places where they spend money. Where if you're in that part that's just wrong, you have to be careful.”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think there are a lot of questions about why did Chrome be Edge? Was it all big or is there something else and kind of all of that could be up? But the basic question you're asking, is there more opportunity for change in these default use cases where People will look at a new browser. Absolutely.”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That Google was able to take so much market share, or was there some other reason, right? And we'll see that. You know, in our case, the distribution piece has just been hard. You know, Microsoft routinely Microsoft updates and making it hard to use Firefox. I mean, Microsoft uses its distribution channels. To its own advantage pretty ferociously, like people often ask us about Google and distribution. And I'm like, well, Microsoft too.”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Does it work well for general search? Does it work well for long term search? Does it work well for shopping? Does it work well in the places where people spend money like those are the kinds of questions that are just beginning to be understood? So do I think that disruption is coming? Much more likely in the browser space than six months ago for sure where it was really locked. Even Microsoft with its vast distribution channel couldn't compete. And so that's actually an interesting question as couldn't compete in browsers. Was that all due to search? That because Edge had Bing as a default?”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that's the experimentation piece, right? So So, yes, I do think it's a time of potential great change. Like Microsoft has a model for it. That may or may not be the right model. Like sometimes first mover advantage works and sometimes it's notorious that it's the second or third attempt at a product that is the one that actually succeeds. So I think there's a lot of change coming. Is it going to be instantaneous? Probably not. Where is it actually going to work well in products?”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. I think there is an awareness there that this was a tech demo. But Bing is a product, right? It runs on a new model. It's got all of Microsoft's values wrapped around in it. It's got a monetization engine in it. It's a product. They seem pretty confident in it. My question to you is like, that's a product that competes with a Google advertising funnel that is worth a $500 million payment to you all in a multi-billion, like it's just lead gen, right? They're paying $2 billion or whatever it is to Apple is basically lead gen to their advertising business and search. If you take that away, if you remove that, is there still a huge business model for browsers as a whole”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The use cases change enough. So one of the things, and I'm sure this must be Microsoft experience the same thing we do, the user, the muscle memory of like... All of humanity's used search is the Google search. And we've tried a lot of different ways. In Firefox to give people different options. And the muscle memory is intense. People will find surprising workarounds. To get themselves back to a search results page, even if we're pretty sure we can give them what they want faster. So I do agree that when you have enough change and expectation, that's an opportunity. So in that sense, I think the browser space could change. We'll want to see it wasn't that long ago where even Sam Altman was saying, you shouldn't be using this for anything serious”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think there's opportunity to capture share and web browsers back? I mean, Nadella said this to me, and I thought, I haven't heard this in ages, that we think we're going to take market share back from Chrome. Is that an opportunity that you think about from your share”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we're interested in other products in any case. We could take the generative AI piece out and say, are we interested in other products? And the answer is yes for a comfort reasons, right? More ways to engage with people, more ways to improve the internet with multiple products. So absolutely. We have a very strong interest in multiple products and, as I said, have been spending a lot of time really modernizing Mozilla as an organization to be able to do that. You know, our trade-off with we're running a business, oh, and we're building the web through the browser. It has to be remade for other products. Then on the generative AI piece, it's pretty interesting. I mean, it's framed in the browser and business model, but first of all, it's pretty interesting. You know, it's also pretty new.”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the Microsoft case, you have to come up with something entirely new that replaces all of that architecture with something like state of the art, like generative AI. You're kind of in the middle of that dance, right? Do you think, oh, boy, we better go out and find a generative AI solution so people can start typing to us and we can start answering those questions and we building a search product or you're thinking, okay, we've got to build some other businesses. And hope that our browser business doesn't decay as fast as it might otherwise.”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, they see that Microsoft sees that very clearly as a way to take market share and search from Google. Like they're explicit about it. They see it very directly as a way to take market share in browsers back from Google with a new revenue model for the browser attached to it. So as we've been talking, right, I think the audience has probably sussed this out by now. The revenue architecture of the web belongs to Google and they can afford to pay for that search deal with you for a multi-billion dollar search deal with Apple. Because as long as people are funneling through Google search and then out to the web pages of Google ads on them, Google's making money. So this is great for them. If you try to make a browser with a business model that is not monetizing the entire web, you're in a fairly challenging spot as you've been discussing.”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, this is really interesting just by dint of coincidence, I am talking to you after I was in Redmond where I spoke to Mike Chassi Satya Nadella about generative AI. There's a new version of the Bing search engine which has chat GPT technology built into it. They have a new version of the Edge browser with that built into the sidebar, which is I'm sure you're going to laugh at this. I was like, oh, we're just doing toolbars again. All right, here we go.”
2023-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT